This is a picture of me and my mother, Stepanka Bohmova. The photo was taken in Tabor after World War II during our regular Sunday walk.
I used to go for a walk on a very beautiful, long pathway through the wood on Sundays with my mum, both before and after the war. When my dad was still alive before the war, he always said to my mum that he would go to the coffee shop to meet people instead and asked her to join him later. So we were walking until four o'clock in the afternoon, and afterwards she met him in the coffee shop. My mum was very elegant, she liked to dress nicely and she even had her personal tailor in Prague.
We liked to go out to dance with my future husband Jiri Meisl (with whom we had started dating when I was 15). We also went on a lot of trips after the the war in our region. On weekends we usually took Marcela and Zuzana, the daughters of Jiri's brother Richard, with us. Once a month we used to go to Prague because we had a season-ticket for three theatres there.
Jiri and Richard decided to rebuild the confectionary warehouse of their parents after the war. We didn't have very much money but the Orion confectionary factory gave them a credit in the name of their father, and so we got started. I worked with them, and my mum was at home cooking for us and doing the housework.
In April 1946 we had a double wedding, me and Jiri, and Richard and Marta, who was Jewish and had lost her husband during the Holocaust. The wedding was on the same day a year after I had been liberated. I didn't realize until I received a telegram with congratulations from my former co-prisoners.
We shared a house with Richard, his wife and their two daughters. We had the warehouse and sold goods to small businessmen. We had a Tatra and an assistant driver. We were successful, but we worked really hard for it. I was in the shop or in the office every single day. When communists nationalized the warehouse in 1948, I was actually glad that I got rid of it.